A conventional process in photography is to imagewise expose a silver halide emulsion layer, then to develop the resulting latent image with an alkaline solution of a silver halide developing agent, such as hydroquinone, to obtain a silver image in the latent image areas. Usually, the image thereby obtained is then fixed.
It has been contemplated to incorporate the developing agent in the photographic material, for example, in the silver halide emulsion layer. In this case, the development of the exposed emulsion can be set off simply by applying an aqueous alkaline solution. If the alkali is also incorporated in the photographic material, the development can be triggered simply by a water washing.
Systems of this type, incorporating all the ingredients necessary for development, have been described for example in French Patents Nos. 1 257 893, 1 500 987, 1 591, 741, and in British Patent No. 999 247.
A current tendency is thus to simplify the processing of halide photographic materials, especially by incorporating the developing agent in the photographic material. However, the coexistence in the same material of the light-sensitive silver halides and the developing agent brings its own problems, especially concerning stability and keeping conditions.
The purpose of this invention is to solve this problem by providing a process that uses a silver halide developing agent incorporated in surfactant multilamellar microvesicles.